Bloomsbury Children's Books

cell had been used to house old furniture in need of repair and was cluttered, but dry and relatively clean. Rather than make him wait while they emptied it completely, they'd left a few pieces behind. A cracked washtub, a rickety table, and my old bed with the broken leg weren't much, but they were more than most prisoners had.

Coraline sighed. ‘You really don’t understand, do you?’ she said. ‘I don’t want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted? Just like that, and it didn’t mean anything. What then?’

I’d wanted to write a story for my daughters that told them something I wished I’d known when I was a boy: that being brave doesn’t mean you aren’t scared. Being brave means you are scared, really scared, badly scared, and you do the right thing anyway.

‘It’s Coraline. Not Caroline. Coraline,’ said Coraline.

wasn’t the kind of rain you could go out in, it was the other kind, the kind that threw itself down from the sky and splashed where it landed.

it smelled like something very old and very slow.

‘Because,’ she said, ‘when you’re scared but you still do it anyway, that’s brave.’

We moved into our flat in Littlemead, in the tiny Sussex town of Nutley, in the south of England, in 1987. Once upon a time it had been a manor house, built for the physician to the King of England himself, so I was told by the old man who had once owned the house (before he sold it to a pair of local builders). It had been a very grand house then, but it was now converted into flats.
Flat number 4, where we lived, was a good place, if a little odd. Above us, a Greek family. Beneath us, a little old lady, half blind, who would telephone me whenever my little children moved, and tell me that she was not certain what was happening upstairs, but she thought that there were elephants. I was never entirely sure how many flats there were in the house, nor how many of them were occupied.
We had a hallway running the length of the flat, as big as any room. At the end of the hall hung a wardrobe door, as a mirror.
When I started to write a book for Holly, my five-year-old daughter, I set it in the house. It seemed easy. That way I wouldn’t have to explain to her where anything was. I changed a couple of things, of course, swapped the position of Holly’s bedroom and the lounge.
Then I took a closed oak-panelled door that opened on to a brick wall, and a sense of place, from the drawing room in the house I grew up in.
That house was big and old, and it had been split in two just before we moved there.

The mist hung like blindness around the house

But she loved Coraline as a miser loves money, or a dragon loves its gold. In the other mother’s button eyes, Coraline knew that she was a possession, nothing more.